April 9, 2007: "It’s 10:14"

Author:
J. Agre

Concept:
If ever a coin (or token) lent itself to a cool ad, this was it. In fact, I think that was the reason we bought it.

Anyway, we knew we wanted to highlight something very specific about the piece, which meant it would have to be a caption about the clock face or the TIME IS MONEY legend. We ultimately decided the clock was the most interesting angle and came up with this caption reminsicent of the public service announcements we used to hear in the 1970s which said something like “It’s 10:30, do you know where your children are?”.

As an aside, it seems that these sorts of captions which are somewhat nostalgic and familiar to baby boomers (among which we count many customers) tend to work best.

Captions that didn’t make the cut:
I actually wanted to go with “As soon as that little clock hits 10:15, we are going to sell this token to someone else.” but we chickened out. We thought people might find it offensive (even though the joke is that the clock, of course, won’t ever reach 10:15 and so what at first sounds like a mild sales threat, isn’t).